Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Russia Lacks Basic Preconditions for Democracy, Inozemtsev Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, February 27 – This week,
as Russia enters yet another pseudo-electoral campaign, two Moscow newspapers, Yezhednevny zhurnal and Novyye izvestiya have taken the highly
unusual step of publishing an October 2015 address by Vladislav Inozemtsev on
why Russia has never been, is not and won’t likely ever become a
democracy.

Over
the millennium of its existence, Inozemtsev says, “democracy has not existed in
Russia and does not exist today. There have been periods when the opinion of the
population meant something,” but none when there was democracy and popular
control of the government and its policies.

“More
than that,” he continues, when the population forced a change, it did so by “destroying
the state as such since no other means existed for it to do so – and certainly no
other means no exists and won’t” anytime soon.According to the Russian commentator, there are five reasons for this
unhappy conclusion.

First,
there is history itself, the Russian analyst argues. Over the course of time, “the
country has been associated with the state and the state with the figure of the
ruler” and it has been a place where any alternatives were viewed as a threat
to the state and in many cases as treasonous.

“In
Russia today,” Inozemtsev says, “there is no democracy: in it, there is only
unlimited populism,” a system built “not on a choice of programs but on the
preferences of personalities.” That is why Putin has retained his popularity
even though he has moved from a pro-European market-oriented politician to an
anti-Western and anti-capitalist position.

Second,
and arising from this is “the cult of personality,” something even more important
than the first. “Democracy is a system where society is divided into mobile
groups, called the minority and the majority.” They have to have a minimum
respect for each other because each can become the other over time.

“In
Russia with its constant cult of personality (in the broad sense of this term)
and the dramatization of contradictions, a view of disagreement has a crime has
been formed.”The opposition is first
viewed as trouble makers, then as foreign agents and criminals. No one imagines
anyone moving from a minority to a majority and thus worthy of dialogue.

Third,
Russia has always had a resource-based rather than entrepreneurial economy. The
resources have changed from furs and gold to grain to oil and gas, but the
relationship of the state to them has not.This means that the state wins by expanding territorially to control
more resources and by forcing the population to extract them rather than
develop on its own.

Entrepreneurialism
in Russia “has traditionally been considered not as a mean of promoting the
well-being of society but as speculation or as an activity motivated exclusively
by profit.”That contradicts the basis
of a democratic society which is entrepreneurial in far more ways and views the
values associated with it in a positive way.

Russia
was and remains a rent-based system. Indeed, Inozemtsev points out, it is now
more so than it was in late Soviet times. Then, raw materials constituted 38
percent of Soviet exports. Now, they constitute “almost 73 percent.” And there
are no indications that this is about to change.

“This
means,” he continues, “that democratization looks not only unrealistic but in
part unjust.” Those who ask the powers that be for favors rather than who
demand their rights are not the milieu out of which democracy emerges but
rather a condition of servility that precludes its rise.

Fourth, Russia and Russians suffer from “an
imperial mentality.”They justify the
sacrifice of freedoms to the protection and enhancement of “the greatness”
often interpreted as the size of the state.Democracy would have only hemmed in this drive, and so presenting to
Russians the choice as between democracy and greatness usually is no choice at
all.

Adding
territory to the state has been the chief criterion of greatness for Russian
rulers, and “the loss of territory is the absolute criterion of the failure of
a ruler” in his primary function. Putin’s successes in Chechnya and his annexation
of Crimea “transformed him into a more respected leader of the country.

And
fifth, corruption.“Russia is a country
in which corruption and the misuse of power is a characteristic aspect of state
institutions,” something that requires the “de-structuring of society” and of
any possibility of collective action.After all, “in contrast to lobbying, corruption is an individual almost
intimate process.”

As
a result, Russia “in its present-day form” is a radically individualized
society, one in which individuals seek exceptions to the rules via corruption rather
than a change in the rules by political action, as is the case in democratic
societies, Inozemtsev says.And that has
an unexpected consequence.

Any
increase in personal freedom in an authoritarian society, he points out, “leads
to the formation of ‘an anti-democratic consensus’” because people want to be
able to press their individual demands via corruption rather than take part in
broader changes in the rules of the game.

What
does all this mean? Inozemtsev asks rhetorically. “The striving for freedom and
autonomy, the sense of the supremacy of individual goals over state tasks, an
attitude toward the state as the provider of public goods and not a sacred
symbol, a readiness for collective action and no the individual solution of
systemic contradictions” are all lacking.

And
these are precisely the preconditions for a democratic society. Russia over
time may be influenced from the outside, Inozemtsev says, but he concludes that
he does “not see any reason to suppose that Russia will be able to become a
democracy as long as the main legislative, judicial and executive decisions
continue to be taken [only] in Moscow.”